Kaspersky Anti-Virus Personal 6 Online Manual

How threats spread

The Internet is unique, since it is no one's property and has no geographical borders. In many ways, this has promoted development of countless web resources and the exchange of information. Today, anyone can access data on the Internet or create their own webpage.

However, these very features of the worldwide web give hackers the ability to commit crimes on the Internet, making them difficult to detect and punish as they go.

Hackers place viruses and other malicious programs on Internet sites and disguise it as useful freeware. In addition, scripts which are run automatically when certain web pages are loaded may perform hostile actions on your computer by modifying the system registry, retrieving your personal data without your consent, and installing malicious software.

By using network technologies, hackers can attack remote PCs and company servers. Such attacks may result in a resource being disabled or used as part of a zombie network, and in full access being gained to a resource and any information residing on it.

Ever since it became possible to use credit cards and e-money through the Internet in online stores, auctions, and bank homepages, online scams have surfaced as one of the most common crimes.

Your intranet is your internal network, specially designed for handling information within a company or a home network. An intranet is a unified space for storing, exchanging, and accessing information for all the computers on the network. Therefore, if any one network host is infected, other hosts run a significant risk of infection. To avoid such situations, both the network perimeter and each individual computer must be protected.

Since practically every computer has mail clients installed on it and since malicious programs exploit the contents of electronic address books, conditions are usually right for spreading malicious programs. The user of an infected host unwittingly sends infected messages out to other recipients who in turn send out new infected messages, etc. It is common that infected file documents go undetected at are sent out with business information from a large company. When this occurs, more than a handful of people are infected. It could be hundreds or thousands, all of whom then send the infected files to tens of thousands of subscribers.

Beyond the threat of malicious programs lies the program of electronic junk mail, or spam. Although not a direct threat to your computer, spam increases the load on mail servers, eats up bandwidth, fills up your mailbox, and wastes working hours, thereby incurring financial harm.

Also, note that hackers have begun using mass mailing programs and social engineering methods to convince users to open e-mails or click a link to a certain website. It follows that spam filtration capabilities are both for stopping junk mail and for counteracting new types of online scans, such as phishing, and for stopping the spread of malicious programs.

Removable media (floppies, CD/DVD-ROMs, and USB flash drives) are widely used for storing and transmitting information.

When you open a file that contains malicious code from a removable storage device, you can damage data stored on your computer and spread the virus to your computer's other drives or other computers on the network.

Sources of threats

Types of threats

Signs of infection

What to do if you show signs of infection

Preventing infection